Ways to texture an environment

There is no single way to texture a game environment. Studios mix a handful of approaches that trade uniqueness against reuse: a texture painted for one prop looks specific but costs memory for that prop alone, while a tiling material or trim sheet can cover a whole level at a steady texel density. Tim Simpson calls trim-based modular kits "the backbone of most environment work" and contrasts them with "massive 4k unique unwrap textures" (Polycount: TUTORIAL: Trim Textures for environment art…).

This page is a map. Each approach has its own page; this one compares them and shows how they fit together.

#Two questions for classifying approaches

It helps to separate two things that are often mixed up:

1. How the texture is mapped and shared. Is it unique to one asset, does it repeat across a surface, or is it a strip or tile on a shared sheet? This decides memory, draw calls and reuse.
2. How the texture is made. Is it built from nodes, sourced from photos, painted by hand, or a mix? This decides the look and the toolset.

A tiling stone floor can be procedural, scanned or hand-painted. A trim sheet can be sculpted, built in Substance Designer or painted. Pick the mapping approach for production reasons, then pick the authoring method for the art style.

#The mapping approaches

Unique texturing gives an asset its own non-overlapping UVs and its own texture set, usually painted in Substance 3D Painter or a similar tool over baked mesh maps. Painter's smart materials, for example, "include mesh-specific detail" but need those maps baked first (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Create and use Materials and Smart Materials). Best for hero props and anything that needs specific wear.

Tileable materials repeat seamlessly in one or both directions. They keep density constant however large the surface is, which is why François Hurtubise calls them "pretty much essential" wherever "surfaces cover wide areas" (80 Level: Using Tileable Textures in Game Environments).

Trim sheets are textures made of strips that tile in one direction: mouldings, panel edges, pipes, bevels. Many meshes map their UVs onto the same sheet. Tim Simpson says they help "keep your memory budget and drawcalls down" (Polycount: TUTORIAL: Trim Textures for environment art…).

Texture atlases pack the textures of several different objects into one texture, so they can share one material. Unity's manual describes this as "texture atlasing" and notes that "only GameObjects sharing the same Material can be batched together" (Unity Manual: Draw call batching).

Decals and mesh decals place small details such as stains, cracks, labels and bolts on top of other surfaces. Decal textures are often atlased themselves so that they "use a single material and set of textures" (machin3.io: Atlasing).

Vertex blending paints vertex colour values that blend two or more tiling materials, for example moss over stone. Unreal's Mesh Paint mode lets you paint colours "directly to the mesh itself" and has guides for setting up "painted texture blending" materials (Unreal Engine documentation: Mesh Paint Mode in Unreal Engine). On Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the team used "vertex paint to blend two sets of textures together" (80 Level: A Look at the Material Workflow in Assassin's…).

#The authoring methods

Procedural materials are built from node graphs, most often in Substance 3D Designer, which Adobe describes as having "a heavy focus on procedural generation, parameterization and non-destructive workflows" (Substance 3D Designer documentation: Substance 3D Designer overview).

Photo-sourced and scanned materials start from photographs: a single photo converted to a material (Substance 3D Sampler documentation: Image To Material), or hundreds of photos reconstructed with photogrammetry. Poly Haven captures "around 300 images per 2 metre square area" for its scanned textures (Poly Haven Blog: Photoscanned Texture Creation Process).

Hand-painted textures paint form and light into the colour map. Blizzard's Fanny Vergne describes the aim as creating "the illusion of materials by painting in the way light interacts with the surface" (80 Level: The Strings of Environment Design).

#Comparison

"Memory cost" here is relative. A level budget is a total, not a per-asset rule: Eric Chadwick's example on Polycount is "30 512x512 textures per level", where "one 1024x1024 texture = four 512x512 textures out of your budget" (Polycount: Question: How many trim sheets are commonly…).

#How studios combine them

Most real assets use several approaches at once. The usual split is shape in the mesh, material in shared textures, specifics in unique textures or decals. See the mid-poly workflow for the modeling side of that idea.

A practical default for a modular environment:

1. Tileable materials for every large surface.
2. One or two trim sheets per material family for edges, mouldings and repeated details.
3. Vertex blending and detail maps and macro variation to break up repetition.
4. Decals for story and grime.
5. Unique textures only for hero props and things the player inspects.

#Further reading and watching